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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Miles Davis: Restless Grooves

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: May 25, 2001

I'VE changed music five or six times,'' Miles Davis wrote in ''Miles: The Autobiography'' (1989), a book that offers a great modern example of the untrustworthy narrator. All the huffing and bluffing and posturing one ever suspected to be within him was collected in that volume; much of it was graceless and thickly applied, an older man's attempt to reassert his place in history when he may have been losing it. His new music wasn't what it used to be, and his discography was a shambles.

If Davis, who died in 1991, did indeed believe that his importance was slipping, if he had anxiety about the future after he was gone, that only diversified the portfolio of psychological imperatives he regularly offered his audience. As much as the serious listener might hate to hear yet more about his image (all that old ''Prince of Darkness'' stuff), it is undeniable that his music draws some of its richness from extramusical gamesmanship: its cunning, guile, perversity and honesty. Miles Davis loved boxing, that second-guessing game. And he loved surprising people, giving them what they didn't expect. The well-considered pauses in his playing can be heard as the sound of a master strategist.

But back to that bold, bracing, even ridiculous idea about changing music: it's an assertion that few other jazz performers would bother making, since jazz makes changes only within its own world and usually operates on a conceptual model of slow refinement, rather than rupture and revolution. Inasmuch as Davis was different from most jazz performers -- and he was -- it is easier to say that he contributed new templates for making jazz, whereas most of his peers were content to inscribe established ones.

Davis, who would have been 75 tomorrow, is better served by reissues than any other artist in jazz. We've come a long way from the beginning of the CD era, when most of his work after 1967 was out of print, and what was in print suffered from bad audio transfers. Now Legacy, Columbia's reissue arm, has completed box-size reissues of all the major periods he was under its contract, sometimes treating a single album as a period (which was indeed the case, if you look closely).

It has been done with sensitivity, and the buyer has options: individual albums have all been singly rereleased, if you want to hear them as they were meant to be heard, free of context and scholarly apparatus. And if you want more, box sets range from $50 for a forthcoming three-CD collection covering his first stabs at jazz fusion to $109 for an eight-disc set of his early work.

To do his fender job on the century of American jazz, Davis's place and timing was perfect. He was 18 when he heard the Billy Eckstine band, an ark that carried Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, in St. Louis in 1944. Davis left town in 1945, the year Parker and Gillespie made their first joint recordings and the first year bebop was generally acknowledged. As a well-heeled, quietly intense outsider slightly behind the curve, he had the advantage of seeing the risk-taking pioneers from a position of safety.

But then he submerged himself in fire, trying to keep up with Parker's frightening speed as a regular member of his band. These raw apprenticeship years are best collected on ''CHARLIE PARKER: THE COMPLETE SAVOY AND DIAL RECORDINGS'' -- (Savoy/Atlantic), including some sessions under Davis's name.

In 1948 Davis was able to put his name on his first head-turning record, though it had several authors. At the time he was part of a social scene that included the composer-arrangers Gil Evans and Johnny Carisi, the pianist John Lewis and the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan; they convened at Evans's Midtown Manhattan apartment, swapping ideas.

It would be hard to imagine more divergent talents coming together, but such were the times. Jazz had been chopped in half by bebop, which caused a long-lasting audience schism, killed the big bands and ended the idea of jazz as a dance music. The best of the young jazz composers in the late 1940's were trying to make something new on the devastated ground; theirs was a task not too dissimilar from the one facing the postwar German and Japanese novelists at the time.

The resulting nonet sessions -- ''BIRTH OF THE COOL'' -- (now reissued as ''THE COMPLETE BIRTH OF THE COOL,'' -- Capitol) -- made as a series of individual 78-r.p.m. records organized and contracted for by Davis, acknowledge orchestral writing, European harmony and bebop phrasing. Their chastened rhythmic feeling, so different from bebop's charging subdivisions, was a sign not of retreat but of reconsideration. The recordings were credited to Davis, yet it would be hard to assign ownership of this music to anyone involved: nobody in the group made records quite like this later on. (Gil Evans came closest, and more on that anon.)

Aside from the idiosyncratic ''Birth of the Cool,'' navigating early Davis is tricky. There were no LP's in the early and mid-1950's, so the master of the long-playing idea that Davis became was not yet born. But ''WALKIN' '' -- and ''BAGS' GROOVE'' -- (both on Original Jazz Classics) need little supporting context to be appreciated. By 1954, having come through his training in bebop -- a form so rigorous and seductive that it limited the artistic growth of a lot of good improvisers -- Davis had found his way to a confident improvisational style but still not a breakaway identity.